Adding to my limited bona fides in the 1990s, we had two pretty good Italian restaurants in proximity to where I lived: Cafe D'oro, a restaurant that eventually imploded in scandal, and the Baricelli Inn, Cleveland's Michelin-rated fine-dining centerpiece nestled among dozens of mediocre or worse "Italian" restaurants in Cleveland's Little Italy.

Many of us shed a tear when the wood-fired pizza oven was dismantled to make way for the nightclub that now resides in the space. The food was better than average at worst, at least prior to the end, and they employed a dyed-in-the-wool Italian to tend the pizza oven.

At the tender age of "Not Yet Old Enough To Drink" Cafe D'oro hipped me to the very authentic European practice of day drinking red wine while snacking on cold-cuts and proper cheeses, that tomatoes are for late summer and that pizza doesn't have to have a "culinary clown car" of toppings.

I never had the pleasure of dining at The Baricelli Inn, but I did have the pleasure of "dating" a waitress who would spend a great deal of time in Paul Minnillo's "cheese cave" (he was among the first restauranteurs in America to evangelize the concept of "affinage"). She would come home wanting to shower and I would want to curl up with her and all her cheese funkiness. It's not exactly a cheese fetish, but it's close.

My sister lived in Florence (Firenze) for several years, learning to speak Italian fluently. I visited her for two weeks in 2003 after being laid off. We returned years later as a group, after she had moved back to New York, with some friends and met up with her ex-boyfriend (a Florentine Irish pub owner, no less) in a rented villa (less expensive that you would think, split 8 ways).

Mornings would start late, afternoons would slip into evenings - a walk in the trellised hills, glasses of wine, naps.

We would tour Tuscany's winding roads to go out to eat, explore Medieval castles and villages. We would make dinner, pasta, roasts, antipasti, more wine. We would wave at each other and call back and forth "ciao, ciao!"

Those are my Italian food bona fides - such that they are.

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Pazzia Caffe

The first, best thing about Pazzia Caffe is that it is not in North Beach, San Francisco's "little Italy" and a district for which I have abiding lack of affection despite its own bona fides (ground zero of the beat generation, the wedding place of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, a truer, older subculture of literature and art that puts to shame all that the Summer of Love and Haight-Ashbury has produced).

Modern North Beach is the valley on which the collar popping crowd descend from their domiciles in Nob Hill, Pacific Heights and the Marina. Like many places in the Mission, I will not set foot in most of North Beach after dark. I stay out of it during tourist-heavy events (Fleet Week, the Jazz Festival, Hardly Strictly, Noise Pop, etc).

That's because I am a curmudgeon and complainer who has lost my joie-de-vivre. I encourage the uninitiated to walk Columbus from end to end on a sunny afternoon, stopping first for espresso and when you near the end of your journey, a glass of Chianti.

Stop in Vesuvio for an Irish coffee or bloody mary. Check out City Lights Books while it's still there. Get a table dance at the Lusty Lady - San Francisco's unionized worker-owned peeler bar.

North Beach is not the hell-hole I often describe it as, and, well, I lived in the Mission for ten years so what does that say about me? Still, it's nice to not actually have to be in North Beach to get good Italian.

Its even nicer not to be in Cleveland's Little Italy. What can be said about Cleveland's Little Italy? I asked a good friend of mine back home who is in the food and beverage biz:

Boy am I going to catch hell for this...

[ To be fair, there a lot to like about Little Italy, and it's certainly not as bad as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. But it has a well earned reputation for violence, cloistered, close-mindedness and yes, racism and homophobia. As the years go by, the neighborhood improves. ]

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Pazzia is on Third Street between Folsom and Harrison, which was just adjacent to what was originally a garment district of SOMA (the SF MUNI shuttling Asian immigrant textile workers between warehouses and Chinese and Pacific-rim enclaves along Stockton in Chinatown all the way out to the Sunset).

Of course, the real fun of Pazzia is the Italian-to-the-bone staff and the owner, an artist and painter who is responsible for the decor and who also designs wine labels (must be nice).

Its one of my favorite places to take dates - because the staff will flirt shamelessly with your companion. It shows confidence that you can have all these handsome Italian men falling over themselves to flatter her. Chivalry isn't dead, its in SOMA.

Their pizzas are Napolitano to the core: thin, crispy pizzas large enough to a good meal for a single, hungry person, or to be shared by up to four people. The pizzas arrive table side nuclear hot and bubbling, the crust has a hint of a flakiness to it as if a small amount of oil is used in mixing the dough.

The menu is divided in the familiar sections of antipasti (cold cuts, zuppa and insaladas),primo (divided into pizza and pasta) and secondo. Primo and Secondo are also the names of the protagonists for the epic food-nerd film "Big Night". Go out and, uh, download it today! Save room for dessert.

The primo and secondo change seasonally with daily specials. The gnocchi is always a winner, as is the ragu Bolognese with tagliatelli - a wide, flat noodle hailing from the Emilia-Romagna served with a stewed meat sauce.